A periodic reminder from Kristin Cavallari that she named her Yorkshire terrier after Brigitte Bardot:
She named one of her shoe designs “Bardot,” too
This has been 500 Days of Kristin.
[Photo via Getty]
A periodic reminder from Kristin Cavallari that she named her Yorkshire terrier after Brigitte Bardot:
She named one of her shoe designs “Bardot,” too
This has been 500 Days of Kristin.
[Photo via Getty]
An incredibly popular alarm clock, a versatile griddler, and a $28 Logitech gaming mouse highlight today’s best deals. Bookmark Kinja Deals and follow us on Twitter to never miss a deal. Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more.
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If you didn’t get a life-changing
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The 3-in-1 Cuisinart Griddler is one of the best things I purchased in 2015, and Amazon will sell you one for just $50 today, which is about $35-$50 less than usual. [Cuisinart GR-4NR 5-in-1 Griddler, $50]
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Pro tip: Pick up the waffle iron plates to go with it. You won’t regret it.
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If one of your new year’s resolutions is to lose some weight and live a healthier lifestyle, you should definitely consider picking up this Withings smart scale.
The Sweethome-recommended Withings Smart Body Analyzer looks like any other bathroom scale at first glance, but it can automatically sync your vitals to your phone (including Apple’s HealthKit), track your indoor air quality, and even measure your heart rate. It typically sells for $130-$150, but Amazon has it for $97 right now, which is a match for its Black Friday price. [Withings WS-50 Smart Body Analyer, $98]
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Speaking of New Year’s resolutions, if you’re planning on putting on some muscle, Amazon’s Gold Box is overflowing with discounted weights, benches, and more, today only. [Save 50% or more on select strength and training items]
Logitech’s fantastic G500s gaming mouse is down to just $28 on Amazon today, the best price we’ve ever seen. [Logitech G500s Laser Gaming Mouse with Adjustable Weight Tuning, $28]
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More Gold Box Gaming Deals:
Corsair Gaming K70 RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard, Aircraft-Grade Aluminum ($140) | Amazon
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Creative Fatal1ty Gaming Headset ($16) | Amazon
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CybertronPC Hellion Gaming PC (3.5 GHz AMD FX-6300 6-Core, 2GB GeForce GT740, 16GB DDR3 1600MHz, 1TB HDD, WiFi, Windows 8.1 64-Bit) ($540) | Amazon
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If you just got a PS4 for Christmas, The Witcher 3 is probably the best game you can buy for it right now
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If you’d rather carry around a pocket-sized battery pack, this 3600mAh model from Aukey actually charges with a Lightning input, meaning Apple devotees can finally travel without carrying around a grody old microUSB cable. It’ll only set you back $10, and even comes with a Lightning cable, which would normally run at least $5 by itself. [Aukey 3600mAh Lightning Input Battery Pack, $10]
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Need something to spend all of those Amazon gift cards on? How about a 4K IPS monitor. I use this exact model every day, and couldn’t be happier with it. [Dell Ultra HD 4K Monitor P2415Q 24-Inch Screen LED-Lit Monitor, $400]
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Whether you’ve owned a PS4 or Xbox One for years, or just got yours yesterday, your controllers deserve to charge in style. [PDP Energizer 2X Charging Station for PS4, $20. Also for Xbox One.]
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Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here
A total of 965 people fell dead this year after hearing the blast of a gun that belonged to a police officer.
This statistic was gleaned from records of every fatal police shooting in the nation in 2015—a number that until now had never been calculated. The Washington Post concluded a year-long study on Sunday, publishing a comprehensive breakdown of the state of fatal police shootings, from ones involving both armed and unarmed victims. The report reads:
The Washington Post found that the kind of incidents that have ignited protests in many U.S. communities — most often, white police officers killing unarmed black men — represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. Meanwhile, The Post found that the great majority of people who died at the hands of the police fit at least one of three categories: they were wielding weapons, they were suicidal or mentally troubled, or they ran when officers told them to halt.
More specifically, the report made some noteworthy findings regarding the identities of the victims. Some 40 percent of the unarmed men shot to by police this year were black—despite the fact that black men make up just 6 percent of the country. A disproportionately high number of men who were killed without exhibiting threatening behavior were black or Hispanic.
The names of many of those killed by police have incited protests across the U.S. this year and the one before it—yet the shootings continue to happen.
[Image via AP]
Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.
Crime is down in the Modern Gomorrah, but not everyone has accepted it.
According to statistics released by New York City officials on Sunday, the city is expected to see a 2 percent decrease in reported crime by year’s end. Counts of murder, rape, robbery, serious assault, burglary, grand larceny and car theft were included in the numbers, tracked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Arrests also fell by 13 percent over the same period last year.
“As we end this year, the City of New York will record the safest year in its history, its modern history, as it relates to crime,” said city Commissioner William Bratton, announcing a drop in crime in New York City over 2015, according to The New York Times.
Instead of reporting this news, The New York Post continued the time-honored tradition of spewing fear-mongering headlines, as is its wont. Earlier this week, the paper reported claims by former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who alleged that the NYPD is manipulating crime statistics and served as a general hype-man for fear and hysteria about safety in New York.
Earlier this year, the Post published a story
[Image via Getty]
Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.
A New Hampshire couple who divorced last year, but got back together, are not able to undo their divorce.
Terrie Harmon, a lawyer, and her ex-husband, Thomas McCarron, were married for 24 years before divorcing in 2014. According to the Associated Press, the couple reconciled, and filed a joint motion to vacate the divorce decree in March of this year. Harmon tried arguing that the divorce was erroneous, but the state’s Supreme Court decided otherwise, in a unanimous ruling.
While some states, such as Illinois, Nebraska and Maryland allow divorces to be overturned within a specific time frame or under certain circumstances, others, like New Hampshire, have no statutory authority to do so. “Divorce is a uniquely fraught area of litigation,” Attorney Joshua Gordon said. “For divorced couples, it is often important to have the solace of knowing that their former spouse is indeed former.” He stated that this kind of argument could “jeopardize the finality of all divorces.”
In regards to the question of the couple just remarrying instead of trying to undo the decree, Gordon stated, “I think it was partly sentimental, and partly that they had some business interests that a divorce and remarry would be more complicated than undoing the divorce.”
Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.
Image via Shutterstock.
An Al-Jazeera investigative report will allege an Indianapolis anti-aging clinic supplied Peyton Manning with human growth hormone, according to The Huffington Post.
The report airs on Al-Jazeera Sunday night, and features a former pharmacist at the Guyer Clinic. That pharmacist, named Charlie Sly, says the clinic mailed HGH and other drugs to Peyton Manning’s wife, Ashley—to keep the five-time MVP’s name from being attached to them, according to The Huffington Post.
http://deadspin.com/5842474/what-i...
Manning’s agent did not deny growth hormones were shipped to Ashley Manning to Al-Jazeera, stating it was an issue of medical privacy but that the pharmacist Charlie Sly’s claims were “outrageous and wrong.”
Sly also named Ryan Howard, James Harrison, Julius Peppers, Ryan Zimmerman, and Mike Tyson as athletes to whom he supplied drugs, according to The Huffington Post.
Sly says that he provided Clay Matthews, Green Bay’s Pro Bowl linebacker, with the prescription painkiller Percocet to help him deal with pain before at least one game. He also brags in one undercover video that Matthews texted him in an attempt to obtain Toradol, a powerful painkiller that is banned in many countries but not in the United States.
The Dark Side: Secrets of the Sports Dopers airs on Al-Jazeera America at 9:00 ET Sunday night.
Update (10:02 p.m.): Here’s a video from Sly in which he not-very-credibly tries to recant his accusations.
Update (10:52 p.m.): Peyton Manning has responded:
To contact the author of this post, write to tim@deadspin.com (PGP key
A bizarre controversy is erupting in Pennsylvania politics, with the state’s Attorney General at the center, drowning in a pool of terrible memes.
In a series of dumps over the past year, the state’s Attorney General, Kathleen Kane, has been releasing email after email sent and received by Pennsylvania state employees and officials. The main themes of the emails are: racism, homophobia, sexism, bigotry, misogyny, pornography and, of course, memes.
The content of the emails, of which some 10,000 have been released so far, is nothing short of jaw-dropping, according to The Washington Post:
A small sampling: A photo of a pantsless woman on her knees performing oral sex on a man is captioned “Making your boss happy is your only job.” A picture of a white man fending off two African American men while carrying a bucket of fried chicken reads “BRAVERY At Its Finest.” The sender of the email that shows a group of men engaged in sex included this message to friends, “How friggin gay are you?”
The ongoing scandal is large and scale and multifaceted: Kane herself is currently facing a criminal indictment for felony perjury, as well as more than one misdemeanor charge in another case—that one for allegedly leaking embarrassing information about a political enemy.
At the same time, the released emails have come back to bite her: several disturbing emails, including one that made light of domestic violence, were sent and received by her twin sister, state prosecutor Ellen Granahan Goffer.
Kane has been pressured to resigns, but maintains her innocence and says that she is the victim of a political “old-boys’ network,” according to The New York Times. So far, six other state officials have resigned.
There is much more to the controversy, including ties to the Jerry Sandusky investigation, politicians caught taking bribes and a bitter political rivalry. Most of all, the scandal should serve as a warning to every one who uses the Internet: stop sending memes.
[Image via AP]
Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.
In an interview this morning with Fox News, Donald Trump
Trump was referring to Clinton’s recent interview with the Des Moines Register. In that interview, Clinton addressed Trump’s recent use of the phrase “got schlonged” as well as his disgust over her use of the bathroom
“I think he has to answer for what he says, and I assume that others will make the larger point about his language. It’s not the first time he’s demonstrated a penchant for sexism. Again, I’m not sure anybody’s surprised that he keeps pushing the envelope.”
Trump told Fox that “mentioning sexism” was what amounted to playing the woman card. The Republican primary candidate then indicated that former President Bill Clinton, who is campaigning for Hillary, is “fair game.”
He also shared some enlightening thoughts about sexism and gender politics on Twitter:
Image via AP.
Al-Jazeera America dropped the full The Dark Side: Secrets of the Sports Dopers documentary on YouTube before its scheduled airing this evening, finally allowing us a look at the allegations HGH was shipped to Peyton Manning’s house
The Manning stuff appears around 40:45 of the above video. Here’s what former Guyer Clinic employee Charlie Sly said on a hidden camera in the video:
I did part of my training at the Guyer Institute, which is this anti-aging clinic in Indiana. Him and his wife would come in after hours and get IVs and shit. So one thing that Guyer does is he dispenses drugs out of his office, which physicians can do in the United States. It’s just not very many of them do it. And all the time we would be sending Ashley Manning drugs. Like growth hormone, all the time, everywhere, Florida. And it would never be under Peyton’s name. it would always be under her name. We were sending it everywhere... it’d go to Florida... Almost all drugs you can prescribe off-label. GH is one of the few drugs, it’s really the only drug you cannot prescribe off-label. It has three indications.
[In response to a question about whether Guyer was prescribing HGH]: I know for a fact he does. I would see patients with him part of the day and the other part of the day I would work in his pseudo-pharmacy. I’m surprised his place has not been shut down yet.
This is mostly in line with what had been reported; perhaps the more intriguing—and convincing—element of the program comes earlier, when Ryan Howard, Ryan Zimmerman, James Harrison, and Clay Matthews are accused of having received drugs ranging from performance-enhancers to narcotics.
Update (1:40 p.m.): Dr. Dale Guyer of the Guyer Institute has responded to the documentary:
To contact the author of this post, write to tim@deadspin.com (PGP key
The death toll for a wave of storms and flooding
As of Sunday, a total of 11 people had died in the Dallas, Texas, area alone, and dozens more were injured. Another five people died in a separate storm in Illinois over the weekend, bringing the total death toll from the series of storms to 35, according to The New York Times.
Some of the damage inflicted was caused by an EF-4 tornado, the second-most powerful category, that brought with it 200-mph winds on Saturday night.
Earlier this week, the Weather Channel reported that more than 20 tornadoes touched down, with Mississippi experiencing the heaviest effects.
Meanwhile, other countries are being simultaneously being hit by severe storms and flooding. England, Wales and Scotland have all been hit by serious flooding, triggering the army to be called in for rescue efforts.
Another series of floods has displaced more than 150,000 people in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, walloping some 38 cities.
[Image via AP]
Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.
“We’re going to see ... With kids and grandkids and all this, it’s kind of hectic ... We’ll look into it. If our time is available, then yeah, maybe we’ll do it. Maybe. We’ll have to see,” said Randy Reynolds, a diehard Donald Trump supporter who’s just not sure if he’ll show up to vote. The Washington Post reports that many of Trump’s supporters, unsurprisingly, say the same thing.
Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.
Though she has technically finished
I love the holidays for berry stained lips and shimmery eyes, but any of these looks below are perfect to change up your daily makeup routine and leave you feeling festive.
It ends like that, too—the rest is just pictures.
This has been 500 Days of Kristin.
[Photo via Getty]
Further details emerged Sunday in the fatal police shooting that left two people, a teenager and his 56-year-old neighbor
http://gawker.com/chicago-police...
Early Saturday morning, 19-year-old Quintonio LeGrier’s father called the police after his son became agitated during an argument and began brandishing an aluminum bat. In a statement, Chicago police said that officers responding to the call “were confronted by a combative subject resulting in the discharging of the officer’s weapon.”
Police also fatally shot 55-year-old Bettie Jones, who lived downstairs. “The 55-year-old female victim was accidentally struck and tragically killed,” the police statement said. The statement also extended “deepest condolences to the victim’s family and friends.”
However, according to the Chicago Tribune:
Family members said Jones was alongside LeGrier near a front door, yelling “No! No! No!” as she tried to intervene in the situation between the teen and officers.
Albert Person, LeGrier’s cousin and a friend of Jones’, said he was told LeGrier was shot seven times and Jones was struck four times.
Person questioned why police fired at the two, claiming they did so from across the front yard as his relative stood in the doorway. LeGrier was holding a baseball bat but was not an immediate threat to officers, he said.
“Police are supposed to serve us and protect us, and instead they kill us,” LeGrier’s mother, Janet Cooksey, told reporters. “What’s wrong with this picture?”
“He should have dealt with his child. He shouldn’t have called the police,” Cooksey said of her son’s father. “My son weighed 150 pounds.”
According to the Associated Press, the father, Antonio LeGrier, described his son as a “whiz kid” visiting on break from Northern Illinois University, where he was an electrical engineering technology major. The young man reportedly spent most of his childhood in foster care, and struggled with mental health issues.
Cooksey denied earlier accounts that her son was emotionally disturbed, the AP reports. “My son was happy. He’s not an angry child. He’s not a violent child,”
“For them to kill him and then disrespect him and say his behavior was that way—no, it was not,” she said. “He might’ve been angry with his father and they might’ve got into it...But he never had combative behavior.”
Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced an investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s use of deadly force and officer discipline.
Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
After October’s announcement of a change in China’s infamous one-child policy, the country’s lawmakers have formally approved the new legislation, which will allow couples to now have two children. The law will go in effect on January 1, 2016.
According to CNN, the one-child law was instated during the 1970s in an effort to control population growth. The controversial policy caused forced abortions, mandatory sterilizations and infanticide to occur over the next several decades. In 2013, a Chinese mother named Shen Hongxia died following a risky sterilization procedure that government family planners forced her to undergo.
The revised law was made in response to the issue of “an aging population,” according to a statement released by Communist Party leaders in October. Researchers suggest the country’s rapidly aging population could include over 400 million people over the age of 60 within the next 15 years. “History will look back to see the one-child policy as one of the most glaring policy mistakes that China has made in its modern history,” Wang Feng, a professor at Fudan University and a leading demographic expert on China, had said.
Amnesty International believes the policy change is “not enough.” The human rights group released a statement shortly after the change was announced. “Couples that have two children could still be subjected to coercive and intrusive forms of contraception, and even forced abortions — which amount to torture,” said William Nee, Amnesty International’s China Researcher. “The state has no business regulating how many children people have. If China is serious about respecting human rights, the government should immediately end such invasive and punitive controls over people’s decisions to plan families and have children.”
Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.
Image via Getty.
As aquifers dry up, after years of drought, vast swathes of California are sinking—in some places more than a foot a year—causing billions of dollars of damage to the state’s infrastructure: “It’s shocking how a huge area is affected, but how little you can tell with your eye.”
China said Saturday that it would not renew a French journalist’s press credentials, the Associated Press reports. Ursula Gauthier, a reporter for the news magazine L’Obs, will become the first foreign journalist to be forced to leave China since 2012.
Gauthier told the AP on Friday that she expected the move, and was prepared to leave. “They want a public apology for things that I have not written,” she said. “They are accusing me of writing things that I have not written.”
The Chinese government has attempted to draw connections between the increasingly bloody ethnic conflict in its Xinjiang region, framing attacks by separatist Muslim Uighurs as part of global terrorism. On November 18th, after the attacks in Paris, Gauthier wrote that Beijing’s expressions of solidarity with the French were at least partly disingenuous. From the AP:
Gauthier wrote that some of the violent attacks in Xinjiang involving members of the minority Uighur community appeared to be homegrown, with no evidence of foreign ties — an observation that has been made by numerous foreign experts on security and on Xinjiang’s ethnic policies and practices.
Advocacy groups have argued that the violence is more likely to be a response to Beijing’s suppressive policies in Xinjiang.
Beijing blames the violence on terrorism with foreign ties. Amid a counterterrorism campaign, a Xinjiang court last year sentenced a Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) scholar critical of China’s ethnic policies in Xinjiang to life in prison. This month, a Beijing court convicted a prominent lawyer of fanning ethnic hatred based on his comments that Beijing should rethink its Xinjiang policies.
In her article, Gauthier focused on a deadly mine attack in a remote region of Xinjiang, which she described as more likely an act by Uighurs against mine workers of the majority Han ethnic group over what the Uighurs perceived as mistreatment, injustice and exploitation.
“China has always protected the legal rights of foreign media and foreign correspondents to report within the country, but China does not tolerate the freedom to embolden terrorism,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said in a statement. Gauthier was no longer “suitable” to work in China because she supported “terrorism and cruel acts.” She will be forced to leave at the end of the year.
Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, extremely optimistic Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders criticized Donald Trump for corrupting voters’ fears and anxieties into xenophobic and racial hatred. Sanders also said that he can win some of those people over.
“Many of Trump’s supporters are working-class people and they’re angry, and they’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries, they’re angry because they can’t afford to send their kids to college so they can’t retire with dignity,” Sanders said.
“What Trump has done with some success is taken that anger, taken those fears which are legitimate and converted them into anger against Mexicans, anger against Muslims, and in my view that is not the way we’re going to address the major problems facing our country.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sanders attacked Trump’s economic policy: “The real issues are not Donald Trump’s vulgarity. And he is vulgar. It is the fact that Donald Trump thinks we should not be raising the minimum wage. He believes that wages in America are too high. This guy wants to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top 3/10 of 1%, and meanwhile what he wants to do is divide our country between Latinos and Americans and Muslims and everybody else.”
Sanders said on CBS that his campaign’s focus on economic inequality and the redistribution of wealth will eventually appeal to those people whose alienation Trump has harnessed. Maybe! Or maybe they’re just bitter old racists.
Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
A Syrian activist and documentary filmmaker, Naji Jerf, was killed in Turkey Sunday, Agence France-Presse reports, citing a statement the group with which he worked released on Twitter.
“Film maker Naji Jerf, father of two children, was assassinated by suppressor gun today in Gaziantep” the group, “Raqa is Being Slaughtered Silently,” wrote, describing a silencer-equipped pistol.
RBSS is a group of citizen journalists who work to expose human rights abuses in Raqa, the northeastern city that IS uses as its de facto capital in Syria.
A friend of Jerf’s said he had been “supposed to arrive in Paris this week after receiving, along with his family, a visa for asylum in France”.
Jerf was also editor in chief of Hentah, a Syrian magazine that reports on the “daily lives of Syrian citizens”, said the publication’s website.
In a statement, the Committee to Protect Journalists said that Jerf was shot outside a building in Gaziantep that houses Syrian opposition media. ISIS has not taken responsibility for the killing, but CPJ reports that some of its supports celebrated Jerf’s on Twitter.
Most recently, Jerf produced a documentary on the slaughter of Syrian activists in Raqa.
Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.
David Spade was not amused by the recent episode of Running Wild with Bear Grylls featuring Barack Obama
“What president does reality shows? It just sounds weird to me, you know what I mean? It’s just too much,” Spade told TMZ. The Saturday Night Live alum, who most recently starred in Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous 6 and Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser, also pointed out the numerous talk show appearances made by the First Lady. “I think that Michelle Obama’s on Ellen more than I am,” he said. “It’s just a new world. It seems a bit thirsty.”
Maybe Obama is just trying to have a good time during his last year in office. Plus, it’s Bear Grylls; it’s not like he’s showing up on Real Housewives and bullying Yolanda Foster. Spade also slammed Obama’s GQ magazine covers. “Leave that to Bradley Cooper,” he said. “You’re the president, you’re above all of us. You’re above stars, you’re above everything. When he’s trying to get in the mix like, ‘I want to present at the MTV awards,’ Alright, guy. Relax. You’ve got it.” Damn.
Spade believes it’s all some kind of a post-presidential strategy. “I think they’re gonna do fine, but they’re sort of plotting after the White House,” he said.
Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.
Image via Getty.